A few hours ago, a Greek minister for administrative reform,  George Katrougalos, told a radio station in Athens that reopening the banks “probably is not technically possible this week.”  The minister’s choice of words is, to be charitable, less then ingenuous.

My advice for Greece and all of Europe in the wake of the Greek “no” vote:

1. Leave both the European Union (EU) and the European Monetary Union (EMU).

This month, Portugal celebrates fourteen years of drug decriminalization. The grand experiment is now considered a happy success considering it was adopted out of desperation and in the face of dire warnings from proponents of the global drug war.

Ryan McMaken’s post about the F-35 Lightning II rightly points out that the only thing defense spending actually defends are the profits of defense contractors. Yet no matter how egregious the waste of taxpayer money, people still seem to think that if the Pentagon isn’t supplied with a steady stream of increasingly high-tech, expensive toys, any day now the communists will be parachuting into rural America, Red Dawn-style.

It’s considered politically incorrect to criticize culture these days, but whether using euros or drachmas, in or out of the European Union, Greece really has to, somehow, sort out its cultural dysfunction. I’m not talking about its customs, traditions, architecture or music, and I’m definitely not talking about its food. I’m talking about its cultural anti-capitalism. The negotiations, deals, counter-deals, referenda, protests and everything in between all mean very little if Greeks, by and large, don’t ditch their statist zeitgeist and rediscover Greek capitalistic exceptionalism.

Last week the Greek government imposed capital controls to prevent cash from escaping from the Greek banking system, which is on the brink of collapse.  These repressive financial measures, which were invented by “Hitler’s banker” Hjalmar Schacht in the 1930s, include the closing of banks,  limiting cash withdrawals from ATMs to 60 euros ($67) per day, and the banning of all money transfers via credit and debit cards to accounts held in foreign countries.